When I posted my Instagram comparison shots earlier, people bitched that it wasn’t the same scene, so it wasn’t a fair comparison.

Fair enough.

John Gruber took the *exact* same shot with an iPhone 4S and a Galaxy Nexus — using the same filter. The results once again speak for themselves. 

While it looks like the Galaxy Nexus has shit on the lens. The reality is that it’s just a shittier lens. 

Yes, I was being a bit of a dick earlier about Android users “polluting” the Instagram feed, but the reality is that the shots do look worse. No point sugar coating it. That’s not the users’ fault. It’s not Instagram’s fault. It’s the quality of the cameras. It’s the OEMs’ fault, and at least partially also Google’s fault (developers constantly bitch about the camera software/APIs baked into Android).

I’m happy that my friends with Android phones now get to experience the joy that is Instagram. I can think of at least a dozen people that I personally know well who wanted this app above all others. Now they have it. And they should.

The beauty of it being cross platform to me is situations like this. Because Instagram is becoming the ubiquitous camera app, it’s a great point of comparison. (It’s something we would have used Flickr for in the past, but no one seems to use Flickr anymore — at least not in the same way.) As a result, we can see how much better an iPhone camera is than a top Android camera. A lot.

This exposes something that is otherwise hard to expose: it’s either a lack of attention to detail amongst Android OEMs or a lack of caring. “Good enough” will never be the best.

That’s what I love about Apple and the iPhone. It’s a fucking beautiful camera. And it keeps getting better. They work really hard to make it so. The Android OEMs do not. Instagram exposes this. That is all.